On very rare occasions, pagan opponents of Christianity during the first three centuries commented on the movement, and in one case at least, explain why it was having some success in converting people.  Here is what I say about it in Triumph of Christianity (Simon & Schuster, 2018), lightly edited here. ****************************** The first extensive discussion of the Christian movement from a non-Christian source (not disinterested, of course!) comes from the end of the 170s. We do not have this source as a stand-alone document.  It is a book quoted, instead, by a Christian author, the great theologian Origen of Alexandria, who cited it precisely in order to refute it.  The book had been written by an otherwise unknown pagan intellectual named Celsus. Celsus’s work was called “The True Word.”  In it he assails Christianity as a foolish and dangerous religion that lacks all academic credentials and poses ominous problems, particularly because it leads people astray from traditional religions.  Celsus’s attack was direct and incisive.  He had read the Christian Gospels and with rapier-like wit [...]

In my earlier posts I tried to show that the two key factors in the success of Christianity in taking over the Roman world were that Christians (well some/lots of them), unlike everyone else in their world, were eagerly trying to make converts and insisted that anyone who accepted their religious beliefs and following their religious practices had to abandon the views/practices they had always had. That's not the view that scholars long held; and it's striking to me that -- unlike some other areas of historical study -- the older view still seems to be widely accepted for those who think it is just "common sense."  Here is how I talk about it in my book The Triumph of Christianity (Simon & Schuster, 2018). ****************************** Older scholarship was virtually unified on the question of why Christianity succeeded.  It filled the spiritual vacuum created by the collapse of paganism, which fell under its own weight.  At this point in antiquity, the view held, no one could any longer believe the ridiculous myths of the pagans or [...]

Did Christians hold massive evangelistic rallies?  Is that how they converted the Roman world?  Did they send out hundreds of missionaries to go door-to-door with  their good news?  Maybe use TikTok? Here I pick up on the question of how Christianity spread in the early centuries, from my previous post, with an excerpt again from Triumph of Christianity (Simon & Schuster, 2018).   ******************************   Christians then, starting at least with Paul, came to be missionary, convinced they had to convert the world.  Goodman maintains it was Paul himself who came up with the idea.  He was the innovator, “the single apostle who invented the whole idea of a systematic conversion of the world, area by geographical area.”[1]   At the same time, this is what makes it so striking and unexpected that outside of Paul’s work itself, we do not know of any organized Christian missionary work – not just for the first century, but for any century prior to the conversion of most of the Empire.  As MacMullen has succinctly put it: “After Saint [...]

I just now got off the phone with a reporter for the London newspaper the Independent who is writing an article on new developments in our understanding of why Christianity spread so widely in the Roman world.  (The Independent is one of the few newspapers anymore that has some articles of substance in addition to the exciting and/or depressing news of the day, given with a decided slant.)  He wanted to know what new information, archaeological finds, and or analyses have appeared over the past seven or eight years and I had to tell him that, well, I didn’t know of any.  (!)  He was surprised, but suggested a few things he had come across (“Christians had better health care/community support” etc), and I had to inform him those were old ideas. Not wanting to go away empty-handed, he asked me my views about the question, Why did Christianity take over the Roman world?  He knew I had written a book on it, but he hadn’t read it, so I went into my standard spiel [...]